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Ask HN: How do you make important life decisions?
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13 points by life_choices
on Nov 16, 2019 |
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9 comments
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(throwaway because personal)
I'm 30 years old, and about to make what might turn out to be the single most important decision in my personal life.
Should I stay and have children with my current partner?
She is a great person, we're great friends, together for a few years, no red flags, but no chemistry on my side. Mathematically, I think I should stay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
Note: The Secretary Problem: a famous problem in mathematics about "optimal stopping." The goal is to find the single best candidate from a list of options when you can only see them one by one and cannot go back to a previous one. The solution involves rejecting a certain number of initial candidates to set a "benchmark" and then choosing the very next candidate who is better than that benchmark, because he or she is the best you've found, and the risk of finding someone even better in the future is lower than the risk of ending up with someone worse.
I feel that having kids and many decades together should be a decision easier to do than what I'm going through. This is the sort of decision I would say: "do it, if it's obvious; if you're having doubts, well, it's a tell". I've been with other partners where I wanted to have kids much more enthusiastically (although
Anyway, I'm trying to be as introspective as possible, and understand what I'm feeling and why.
How can I, at least, not regret - not the decision - but the decision process?
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I like Ruth Chang's framework on her Hard Choices TED talk. 1. Is it lack of information? Sometimes even if you have the ability to see the full future outcome of both alternatives, it is still hard. 2. Hard choices are an opportunity for us to realize and choose what we value most, and define ourselves. "Who am I to be?" (is there a difference?)
There's Bezos' regret-minimization-when-I'm-80-years-old framework.
There's Larry Smith's "Why you will fail to have a great career" talk and how not to make yourself prisoner of others, namely your partner and your children.
There's expected value maximization, multi-objective optimization, exploration-exploitation trade-offs, billion-dollars-russian-roulette decisions, and sunk costs fallacy. Go with your gut, and double check it? Research others in similar previous situations? Ensemble all these models?
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What tools and processes do you use to make your most important decisions?
How do you decide on your personal and professional "wicked problems"?
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"but no chemistry on my side".
Seems like you are trying to solve with your head (models & co) what is essentially a heart problem.
If you had that chemistry, i think you wouldn't be asking yourself so many (deep?) questions. Once you have that deep connection, almost everything else falls into place.
Source: been there, done that.
Good luck.
PS: how about posting this to Reddit? seems like a more appropriate audience and higher expected response rate than HN for such a question.
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Yes, I suspect your diagnosis is correct.
Thanks for your answer.
Where would you post this on reddit? I was hesitant to share the specific personal problem, because I wanted to focus on the decision process.
In any case, if you know any community similar to HN quality for either "personal/relationships" discussion or decision-making, I would love to know.
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gerhenz on Nov 17, 2019 | root | parent | next [-]
I agree with posting this on reddit, my suggestions are r/relationship_advice r/AskMen r/AskReddit r/AskWomen
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p1esk on Nov 16, 2019 | prev | next [-]
Something important I realized when I was about 30 is no matter how beautiful and sexy your girlfriend is, sooner or later (usually after about 6 months of living together) sexual chemistry will be gone. Not completely, but there will be times when you're bored with her (physically, emotionally, or intellectually), and are interested in other women. That's normal. What remains however is whether or not you want to work together with that person on building/maintaining a family (raising kids). Think of kids as a difficult long term project, like a "startup", where the qualities of your "cofounder" can make it or break it. I'd look for the same personal qualities in both a wife and a cofounder. Source: married for 12 years with 2 kids, currently looking for a startup cofounder :)
PS. actually there are several independent kinds of chemistry between people (sexual, emotional, intellectual) and what I wrote equally applies to any of them. Also, you will get used to some of the negative qualities of your wife, but not all, and those can drive you crazy and cause serious conflicts. Try to identify them, and do not expect them to go away.
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gtirloni on Nov 17, 2019 | prev | next [-]
When things are too complicated, break them down.
In this case, even if your partner is saying that having kids is not optional to stay with them, consider both situation separate: 1) do I want to stay with this person for a long time? 2) do I want to have kids? and 3) do I want to have kids with this person?
Only you can answer it and I'm afraid it won't be as objective as you think it could be. Re: having a kid. Do you spend time around kids? If not, try to. See if you feel any joy in being around them (and remember when you're spending time with other people's kids, that 5% of the job, the other 95% happens when nobody is seeing). Try to get more information there.
In the end, you have to learn to live with uncertainty. I think we'll struggle with that.
EDIT: Re-reading your post, I think it's clear what choice you have already made. Don't be afraid to face the consequences, they might not be as hard as you think.
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muzani on Nov 16, 2019 | prev | next [-]
Decision making is not all about math.
I simplify it to two things:
1. Goal
2. Process.
First, you pick goals that makes you happy. I think the big fallacy people make is assuming that marriage+kids makes me unhappy vs being single. You can be perfectly happy doing either. You can be completely unhappy with both paths too.
It's also extremely difficult to decide which one would make you happier. Sure, there are frameworks for each. But the variance is huge. And 'happiness' isn't a fixed number. It's a Δ. Whether you're at 500 happiness or 5, you feel the same.
You can be married to a dream girl, have a dream job, have a million dollars in the bank. Then suddenly someone steals half a million from your bank account. You would still be unhappier than the 45 year old homeless man who got offered a grocery manager job.
So, I look for the Δhappiness.
It's also important not to turn back on decisions. I'm married and have two kids. I cannot choose to have one kid. Even if I had financial troubles or found a better girl, divorce or infidelity would make me very unhappy. There's no way I would put a goal in mind to reduce the number of kids or find a woman good enough to have an affair with. There's no way I can regret my past decisions and be happy too.
One of the downsides of overcalculating is that you'd tend to assign values to things and inevitably regret something.
So I pick a goal, any goal that makes me happy and is achievable, and then burn the other options.
Next is process.
I look for the best process to hit that goal. And just stick to it. I chose a path as a startup developer. I optimize to be the best startup developer I can be, and ignore the things that would land me a job as a manager, CEO, or a FAANG developer.
Now abandon the goal completely. I may reassess my situation periodically, but I don't stay too obsessed on being a developer. If Google offers me an interview, why not?
Goals are difficult to hit because of all the factors in the way. It's easier to just focus on the progress. It's what athletes do win trophies and break records. Nobody can set a promise to win a match 3-0; they can only improve the process to overshoot that goal. Hitting a goal can cause complacency, missing a goal can discourage. Let the process do its work.
If you commit on focusing on your career and not having kids, then design a process to make you the best career man you can be. If you choose to do both kids and career, design a process to be a great dad while being great at your job with your limited hours. If there's no chemistry between you and your partner, create some.
Remember to ditch all the math that got you to your current situation. When assessing the future, you have to recalculate everything.
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Thank you for your very kind answer.
I like it. I will have to digest it further, but on first approximation it seems like two good tactics: 1. to hack the goal/reward system, 2. to manage the exploration/exploitation trade-off.
I agree with the delta's regarding happiness. I might add "satisfaction/accomplishment/pride" in relation to your life's components. I think it goes in a bit of a different direction to what you are saying (million dollars vs homeless with new job).
It also has to do with momentum, I think. As in keep making progress in some aspect. In a professional setting, you can be a startup founder working 100 hours weeks, but if you're riding a growth wave, you're happy and satisfied, even if tired. On a personal level, something similar happens.
I agree with your take on process as well.
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